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A large number of the significant improvements to the guitar that matter to guitarists have all happened ahead of the output jack. Humbucking pickups (which you already mentioned), active electronic pickup systems, locking tuners, various vibrato assemblies, noise cancelling single coil pickups like the Fender Lace Sensor and its successors, the Sustainiac and Fernandes Sustainer systems, piezoelectric pickups, different formulations of guitar strings and different neck and body materials and dimensions are all examples. Certainly, great gains have been made in amplification technology, and the proliferation of cheap mass-produced digital effects and moderately priced high-quality analog effects have allowed a greater variation of noises to emanate from the speakers of guitarists everywhere, but it's not like Ted Nugent could plug in some effect box and sound like Eddie Van Halen - a lot of things happen before the output jack. Also, to borrow the phrase from the coders - "Garbage In, Garbage Out." To marginalize what happens before the output jack is like the director that lets a bad take go and tells the crew "We'll fix that in post". Anything that can be done to get a better quality or more desirable signal out of the guitar in the first place should be considered, since it makes the job of all the things after the output jack all the easier. IMO, guitar effects are best like makeup - most of the time they're better when tastefully done and not noticed, and if you are going to draw attention to it, it better be awesome.)

Normally I have something to contribute on Cube-related things, but I clearly failed. Since I clearly failed on sarcasm and humor before, is it any wonder that I took the primary definition of party as the assumed term? I _know_ I'm an idiot. (My wife had me listed as 'Dumbass' on her phone.) I'll make you a deal. If you would like to kick me from slashdot, go ahead. Otherwise I will stay off for a month.

On a 20x20x20 cube, five random moves would be trivial to solve by inspection plus a tiny bit of brute force. Most kids with decent spatial skills can undo three or four moves on a regular cube without much trouble. What move or moves remained after what was easy to backtrack would only take a few attempts to discover. 20 moves might be a little bit more of a problem on a 20x20x20 cube - not enough moves to get to every possible state on a cube that size, but possibly too many moves to do by visual inspection.

You're right - I should clarify - my confusion had to do with the emoticon's existence, i.e. why was it placed there at all. Since sarcasm is an expected mode of conversation on slashdot, the addition of the frowny face made me wondered if we were supposed to take faux pity on the speaker, and the humor was contained there somehow - I couldn't find the humor there - or it was some new level of meta-sarcasm that I didn't get (but I am now suspecting to be the case). I realize most of the failure of language processing here is mine.

I know that I am typically no fun, I attribute that mostly to refusing to drink alcohol except on rare special occasions. The few times I am in social situations it is usually because I am obligated to be there. However, since Rubik's cube is one of my primary interests, I have one with me most of the time. In talking to other people about Rubik's cube (which is much easier for me than making small talk about myself) I have heard people make statements similar to the one above made by 'pinballer', and with complete seriousness. Since the serious comments by laypeople only illustrate how poorly most people perceive a very small, rigorous mathematical group, I am way past this being a funny statement, even in jest. (I was also confused by the placement of the frowny-face emoticon.)

If I already have a problem with people not knowing where they really are on the internet, and they get horrid stuff all over their computers, and I can't get them to change mbam.exe to mbam.com to run sneakily run Malwarebytes Anti-Malware because they're either completely unfamiliar with file extensions or just plain can't see them to change them, how could I possibly be in favor of the foreseeable URL-free future where they don't even know where they're browsing/downloading stuff from?

Instead of suggesting that 'billcopc' was being anticapitalist when I think all that was intended was an emotional outburst, perhaps we should suggest that he has discovered an unfilled market niche and he should build his own cars to fill said niche. That way, it would be quite hard to accuse him of anticapitalism.

That is a surmountable obstacle and hardly an excuse. I'm not convinced _every_ director is able to raise up someone's acting. Some directors are actor's directors, and some focus more on visuals and/or storytelling and need to cast crack actors to make it work so they don't have to worry about that part as much. Sometimes the editor is able to rescue stuff (but usually only if the director has shot multiple takes). The quality of Ewan McGregor's acting , trying to fill the giant shoes of Alec Guiness, or Liam Neeson's acting, was quite different as compared to Jake Lloyd's or Hayden Christensen's acting. Granted, it would have been quite difficult to cast someone with more experience as Anakin as Lucas seemed like he wanted a new face in the role, but if he _had_ cast someone with more experience, and perhaps in the second and third movie someone with more chemistry with Natalie Portman, there was the possibility that they could have overcome Lucas' ham-fisted lack of direction of dialogue.
Also, in light of all the complaints about Lucas' directing, while I always hear fans say "Empire" (that Lucas did not direct) is the best of them, how come nobody directly complains about "A New Hope" (that Lucas directed) that much?

The down side with the guy that's well-respected and only makes 250K a movie is that it is probably the only picture he's working on, so not only will that 250K be his salary for that year that the film takes in production, but it's got to cover him for the year he spends afterward going around to help promote the film, and possibly even the year after that where he's got to run around promoting the DVD. Once you get done with agents, accountants, and taxes, there's not so much to go around any more. Please refer to Chapter 36 of "If Chins Could Kill:Confessions of a B-Movie Actor" by Bruce Campbell. The chapter is called "Anatomy of a Paycheck".

Some people at those big studios know that big budgets are not necessary for big profits. James Cameron, Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, and Martin Scorsese (heard of any of those guys?) have all worked for Roger Corman before they were big time. Corman is a master at extracting value from a movie's budget and shooting films on a tight schedule. But, like you said, thanks to the way the accounting is done at most studios, it's not practical for most studios to operate any other way than the bloated way that they do.